In its recent statement regarding the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith noted that its principal means of assessing the doctrinal fidelity of the LCWR was a review of keynote and leadership addresses at the LCWR annual assembly.   Many of the documents in question are publicly available on the LCWR web site.  Given the controversy, I wanted to read some of these documents myself.

What I found was not what I expected.  With all the concerns the CDF raised about “radical feminism,” I assumed I would encounter many stirring denunciations of patriarchy and criticisms of the Church’s teaching that the sacrament of Holy Orders be restricted to men.

Intimations of those positions find their way into the documents here and there.  At most, however, they are a minor concern.  The core struggle revealed in these addresses is an emotional and spiritual one: how to live out a religious life in communities whose vision of Church—a vision that once seemed a real possibility—is increasingly a road not taken.

It would be one thing if these communities were attracting new entrants who shared that vision.  But they are not and the authors of these addresses know it.   For the most part, they are dying.  There is much talk of hope.  But it is clearly not the hope of Isaiah 40, where the Jews in Babylon are assured that their exile is at an end.  It is, at best, an eschatological hope.

Reading these addresses reminded me of a conversation I had with a sister a few years ago. Formed in the self-confident Church of the 1950s, she was ill-prepared for the wrenching changes that came with Vatican II.   By the early 1970s, many of the women who had been part of her novice class had left.  Her own congregation was in turmoil and sisters often struggled to work out the meaning of their vows without much support from their community.  There was real pain in her voice as she recounted this story and I remember thinking that I knew few marriages that would have been able to withstand this kind of strain.  Her ability to persevere, to heal, and to continue to minister to others humbled me.  It humbles me still.

Which is why I have little patience with younger Catholics whose response to the CDF statement was a more or less venomous form of “I told you so!”  You cannot understand the meaning of vows until you have lived them through a major crisis.  Those that have lived them in this manner are generally humble about judging the decisions of others who have faced a similar challenge, for they know how close to precipice they themselves have walked.

I do not argue that the LCWR and its member communities are beyond criticism.  I have sometimes found documents and resources prepared by the Conference and its member communities to be intellectually and theologically shallow.  The same, though, can be said of many documents prepared by Vatican congregations, to say nothing of the statements of some individual bishops.  The intellectual crisis of contemporary Catholicism is a generalized phenomenon.

In the end, the Doctrinal Assessment may be the least of the challenges the LCWR faces.  Nevertheless, it is hard to see how it will really contribute to the organization’s “renewal.”  Discipline can be imposed from above, but renewal cannot be.  It must come from within or it will not come at all.

The former head of the Israeli internal security service, Yuval Diskin, doesn’t trust PM Netanyahu or DM Barak: “I don’t believe in a leadership that makes decisions based on messianic feelings.” He also described Israel as an increasingly racist society. And finally warned about more political assassinations in the vein of Rabin’s. All in Haaretz.

After recent interviews in the same vein by the head of the Israeli Defense Forces and the former head of Shin Bet, the Israeli intelligence service, a lot of red flags are going up over Netanyahu’s war-mongering, the growing power of the West Bank settlers, and the political views of Israel’s political leaders.

Will AIPAC declare these Israelis anti-Semites?

Monday, April 30: The NYTimes reports on a speech given by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert. Speaking in New York he echoed much of what Israeli military and intelligence officials have said. After being booed several times by the American, and presumably largely Jewish audience, he retorted, “As a concerned Israeli citizen who lives in the state of Israel with his family and all of his children and grandchildren,…I love very much the courage of those who live 10,000 miles away from the state of Israel and are ready that we will make every possible mistake that will cost lives of Israelis.”  Do those who live 10,000 miles away seem all too ready to sacrifice American lives as well?

At Georgetown on Thursday, Congressman Paul Ryan gave his much-anticipated talk about the Republican budget he designed and that he has defended as embodying the Catholic social justice principle of subsidiarity — something more than a few Catholics, including the U.S. hierarchy, have found hard to believe.

Several good things have emerged from this episode, it seems to me: One is that a Catholic university was once again an arena for a vigorous debate on contested issues, and I suspect a lot of folks have learned a good deal about Catholic social teaching that we didn’t know before — something to keep in mind when folks start clamoring for certain speakers to be barred from Catholic campuses.

Another good thing: Ryan himself seemed to alter some of his rhetoric, being careful to add words like “solidarity” to his rather “lobotomized” version of subsidiarity. Though as Michael Sean Winters notes, matching deeds to his words would be the important next step.

And perhaps best of all, Ryan seemed to discover the humility of prudential judgment, noting: “What I have to say about the social doctrine of the Church is from the viewpoint of a Catholic in politics applying my understanding to the problems of the day.”

This seems critical, and it’s good to see Ryan’s comrades taking up this line. “Let’s stop the easy moralistic posturing,” as First Things’ Joseph Knippenberg advised the bishops. Indeed. Especially since we need to use that easy moral posturing for the opposition to health care reform, the contraception mandate, and of course the incipient Nazi and Stalinist terror that is set to descend upon us from the White House at any moment.

My favorite development, however, is that this whole saga gave Rep. Ryan a chance to debunk that noxious myth that he is a disciple of the goddess of all things libertarian and irreligious, Ayn Rand. As he told National Review this week, it’s an “urban legend”:

“I reject her philosophy,” Ryan says firmly. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas. Don’t give me Ayn Rand.”

Knippenberg is glad that we can finally be rid of that “canard,” and at MOJ Rick Garnett rips into those who have associated Ryan with Rand. At the scrupulously non-partisan Catholic Vote site, Joshua Mercer takes Ryan’s critics to task:

I earnestly hope that Father Reese and others will now stopping pushing this urban legend now that Paul Ryan has categorically rejected it. Trying to paint Paul Ryan as a bloodthirsty capitalist with no mercy or compassion for the poor might be effective propaganda, but we as Catholics have a responsibility to not bear false witness.

Indeed! How could anyone say such things about Ryan and Rand? Unless of course, as Vince Miller notes, it happens to be Paul Ryan himself. In his own campaign video…

And that’s in addition to these gems that ThinkProgress helpfully gathered:

“The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” Ryan said at a D.C. gathering four years ago honoring the author of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.”

“I give out ‘Atlas Shrugged’ as Christmas presents, and I make all my interns read it. Well… I try to make my interns read it.” — a 2003 interview with The Weekly Standard.

So maybe Ryan and his allies embrace Orwell more than Ayn Rand?

PS: The Aquinas hug is nice, too. But as Esquire’s Charles Pierce notes, Saint Thomas may not provide Ryan much cover.

Der Spiegel online today has a story and photos about the excavation of a mass grave of soldiers killed during the Battle of Lützen (1632), an event of the Thirty Years War remembered most for the death of King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden. Some 20,000 men fought in the battle, and between 6,000 and 9,000 of them are thought to have died. There was no clear victor. Among the items excavated is this bullet etched with a cross. Symbolic enough of why the old regime of Cuius regio eius religio would eventually (after how many more deaths?) yield to regimes of religious freedom.

Or, Part Two of Why would anyone think the bishops’ religious-freedom campaign could serve partisan ends?

The USCCB Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty’s statement “Our First, Most Cherished Liberty” quotes the pope himself – “a friend of America and an ally in the defense of freedom” – to make its case that “religious liberty is under attack.” Speaking to the U.S. bishops in January, the pope remarked that some of them had “spoken to me of a worrying tendency to reduce religious freedom to mere freedom of worship without guarantees of respect for freedom of conscience.”

A few pages later that “worrying tendency” is referenced in a section heading: “Religious Liberty Is More Than Freedom of Worship.” True enough. But what specifically is the pope talking about—or rather, what were the bishops who alerted him to this “tendency” talking about?

Let’s ask Cardinal Francis George. He wrote this in a diocesan-newspaper column on the HHS mandate in February:

The provision of health care should not demand “giving up” religious liberty. Liberty of religion is more than freedom of worship. Freedom of worship was guaranteed in the Constitution of the former Soviet Union. You could go to church, if you could find one. The church, however, could do nothing except conduct religious rites in places of worship — no schools, religious publications, health care institutions, organized charity, ministry for justice and the works of mercy that flow naturally from a living faith. All of these were co-opted by the government. We fought a long cold war to defeat that vision of society.

That column was paraphrased recently in an article at LifeSiteNews by Thaddeus Baklinski. I noticed because the same story was given a full page in my parish bulletin on Sunday. (With no attribution, which is a problem in itself.) It’s mainly a collection of remarks made by Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia in an interview at National Review Online, which Baklinski links to Cardinal George’s column:

Cardinal George had likened the Obama administration’s rhetorical shift from supporting “freedom of religion” to “freedom of worship,” to Russia’s constitutional freedom to worship guarantee under communism, when the state controlled the church.

George said nothing direct about “the Obama administration’s rhetorical shift.” But what he did write functioned like a dog whistle for LifeSiteNews. They saw an opportunity to repeat what has become a popular right-wing anti-Obama meme, and back it up with the Cardinal’s name. Read the rest of this entry »

The Atlantic has an interesting interview with Richard Sparks, a Chicago priest and bioethicist, who worries that conservative factions in the Church might be leading us out of the public sphere by insisting on being allowed to storm into the private.

The background:

Emily Herx was a popular literature teacher at St. Vincent de Paul School in Fort Wayne, Indiana, until she used her medical leave for in vitro fertilization. Herx lost her job and says a church official called her a “grave, immoral sinner.” When she appealed to Fort Wayne Bishop Kevin Rhoades, he told her IVF was “an intrinsic evil, which means that no circumstances can justify it.” The federal government saw things a bit differently. Herx filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and won — paving the way for a civil lawsuit.

Some questions after the jump…

Read the rest of this entry »

There’s really nothing much more comical/offensive than reading political analysts (invariably Anglos) speculating about how Romney picking Marco Rubio has the potential to peel the Latino vote away from Obama.  The stupidity that this implicitly attributes to the Latino electorate(s) is genuinely staggering.

First, it assumes that Latinos have such short memories and that they are going to be so enthralled at the thought of a “Latino” (I’ll explain the scare quotes below) occupying a largely ceremonial post that they will suddenly ignore the anti-Latino rhetoric and legislation that Republicans in state-after-state have been championing for the past 24 months.  Marco Rubio is not going make Latinos forget which party has made millions of Latinos nervous about traveling or going to the grocery store or taking their children to school.   Marco Rubio is not going to make Latinos forget which party demonized Sonia Sotomayor during her confirmation hearing as a racist.  This is not to discount Obama’s historic campaign of deportations and its impact on Latino communities, but the likely effect of that policy on Latino voting has already been priced into the market, so to speak.  And the opportunity that it presented to Republicans to make inroads into the Latino communities has been squandered by the sheer hatefulness of the rhetoric and policies that Republicans have hurled our way since 2010.  There’s also the little problem of Mitt Romney’s enthusiastic embrace during the primaries of the authors of these policies. Obama’s badness on immigration doesn’t mean that we can’t recognize something worse when we see it.

Second, the Rubio-luring-Latino-voters narrative ignores the great diversity among the Latino communities.  Rubio is a Cuban-American.  Most Latinos in the U.S. are Mexican (by a wide margin), followed by Puerto Ricans, and El Salvadorans.  Cubans come in fourth, and they are more concentrated geographically than the others (with the exception of the Puerto Ricans).  They also tend to be seen as “different” by other Latino groups because of the unique circumstances of their arrival in this country.  I can’t count how many times Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans have told me that they do not consider Cubans to be “Latino” in the full sense of the term.  Although the Latino category is a problematic one for any number of reasons, I do think it has some validity in certain contexts.  Nevertheless, to expect the selection of a Cuban-American as VP to be a game changer in this election is to ignore the very real fissures among the Latino communities.  Rubio may make a difference at the margins (and, if picked, he may well have an impact on the race in Florida), but he’s not going to pull a huge chunk of, say, Mexican-American voters in California over to the R column.

OK.  I just had to get that off my chest.  Thanks for letting me vent.

What’s free:

* Peter Steinfels’s review of Ross Douthat’s new book Bad Religion.

* Our editorial on the bishops’ latest statement on religious freedom.

* Timothy Jost’s piece on abortion funding and the Affordable Care Act.

* Margaret O’Brien Steinfels’s column on the bishops’ campaign against the contraception mandate.

What’s not:

* Eduardo Peñalver on the perils of income inequality.

* Christian Wiman on the meaning of faith near death.

* Robert K. Landers on the forgotten fiction of James T. Farrell.

* Charles R. Morris on college as the new luxury item.

* Leo O’Donovan on the Met’s new American Wing.

* Richard Alleva on the film adaptation of The Hunger Games.

* Barbara Dafoe Whitehead on Charles Murray’s new book Coming Apart.

* And more.

What’s free, but not in that issue:

* E. J. Dionne’s column on fixing Citizens United.

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Since they will apparently be taking to the streets this summer to defend freedom, one would expect the Bishops and their hordes to be particularly scrupulous when it comes to defending those poor souls who experience equal discrimination. But, as others have suggested, it seems that there may be limits to their solidarity that are coterminous with a particular political party line.

In the comments on my post about the Notre Dame faculty’s response to Bishop Jenky’s incediary sermon, which compared Obama to Hitler and Stalin, and their request that he resign from the Board of Fellows in the best interest of the University, some suggested that his speech ought to be protected as a private citizen. Indeed, it should, and I don’t expect anyone would disagree with this.

However, as anyone who has relationships and uses language knows, free speech doesn’t mean speaking without consequences. If you aren’t aware of this phenomenon, just ask Roxanne Martino, who resigned from Notre Dame’s Board of Trustees last summer “after a conservative Roman Catholic watchdog group reported that she donated thousands of dollars to an organization that supports ‘pro-choice Democratic women.’” In this case, not only did Martino not make any public statements, but the University administration also claimed that she didn’t even know that she was giving money to groups engaged in such advocacy.

So, a liberal, lay woman quietly contributes her own private money to an organization that, the University claims, she didn’t even realize supported activities contrary to Church teaching, and she is expected and allowed to resign. But a conservative, male cleric publicly compares the President to Hitler, and we don’t even get a “but he didn’t realize who Hitler was” defense. Something doesn’t add up here, but maybe Robert Barron can explain to me how this one “answers itself.”

The Post yesterday, “Jewish-Christian Relations”,  linked to stories about the efforts of the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren, to short-circut a 60 Minutes program on Christians in Israel. Today Juan Cole offers an account of what Oren and the Netanyahu government might have found objectionable: “Top Ten Reasons Israel Tried to Censor….”

UPDATE: MJ Rosenberg offers his view on Palestinian Christians.

Were you surprised by the news that the Vatican planned to install a delegate with sweeping authority over more than 80 percent of American women religious? Non-nun, non-Catholic Get Religion blogger Mollie Ziegler certainly wasn’t. She saw this thing coming a mile away. What did surprise her, apparently, was the series of headlines explaining that nuns were “stunned” by the Vatican’s decision. She even collected a bunch of them to help you understand:

How about the Sydney Morning Herald: “Nuns left stunned by Vatican rebuke for ‘radical feminist’ tendencies” and Chicago Tribune/Reuters: “Catholic nuns group ‘stunned’ by Vatican slap” and Press Herald: “Nuns group ‘stunned’ by Vatican order for overhaul?” and MSNBC: “Catholic nuns group ‘stunned’ by Vatican scolding for ‘radical feminist’ ideas” and Bangor Daily News: “American nuns stunned by Vatican crackdown.” And that doesn’t count the stories that merely mentioned up high that the nuns were “stunned,” such as this one by the Los Angeles Times.

Sure, a Washington Post article has the president of the Sisters of Mercy saying that her nuns are “stunned.” But Ziegler dismisses it: “There is no doubt that this is the media response that some nuns in the LCWR are going with.” Media response. That sounds a lot like “talking point,” doesn’t it?

Given Ziegler’s familiarity with “the theological drift on display among some women religious,” those quotes won’t do. She needs more “specifics.” Maybe I can help. Read the rest of this entry »

My favorite thing about the group’s website is that the “other teachings” link, which is buried way down in the lower right-hand corner of the site, goes to a blank page.

Bumps in the road. Haaretz The Forward

At RNS, Mark Silk makes the connection:

The denunciation of the Leadship Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF, formerly known as the Roman Inquisition) puts this medievalist in mind of the Church’s 15th Ecumenical Council, which wrapped up its business in Vienne exactly 700 years ago next week…

…While they were at it, the Council…suppressed a movement of pious lay women who wore a distinctive habit and lived together in hospices, impressing many by their teaching and the sanctity of their lives. To the men who ran the church, they were dangerously out of line. As the Council put it:

“The women commonly known as Beguines, since they promise obedience to nobody, nor renounce possessions, nor profess any approved rule are not religious at all, although they wear the special dress of Beguines and attach themselves to certain religious to whom they have a special attraction. We have heard from trustworthy sources that there are some Beguines who seem to be led by a particular insanity. They argue and preach on the holy Trinity and the divine essence, and express opinions contrary to the catholic faith with regard to the articles of faith and the sacraments of the church. These Beguines thus ensnare many simple people, leading them into various errors. They generate numerous other dangers to souls under the cloak of sanctity. We have frequently received unfavourable reports of their teaching and justly regard them with suspicion. With the approval of the sacred council, we perpetually forbid their mode of life and remove it completely from the church of God.”

So: Pressed hard by the secular power, the Council asserted its own shrunken authority by bringing the hammer down on a bunch of powerless women whose moral standing with ordinary folk was unsettling to ecclesiastical authority. Sound familiar?

Does it?

In their recent call for a “Fortnight of Freedom,” the bishops (and, presumably, the Anglophiles who just love the way they write) vowed acts of civil disobedience to protest the mandate that insurance companies provide free contraceptive coverage. I wasn’t sure what that sort of civil disobedience would look like, but The Hill reports that it could take the form of priests and nuns being led away in handcuffs from President Obama’s public events:

“This is the most dynamic situation I’ve ever seen since I’ve been involved in Catholics and politics,” said Deal Hudson, president of Catholic Advocate, who also headed Catholic outreach for the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign in 2000 and 2004. “I think civil disobedience is almost inevitable. I think that kind of protest is on the way.”

Republican strategists say the rallies and protests could become powerfully symbolic in the presidential election.

“These would be devastating images for the Obama administration,” said Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist. “You have a very important religious demographic coming out in protest of Obama’s policies and being arrested for their expression. These images would be politically damaging for the president’s campaign.”

And the conference could go beyond protests — it has also discussed working with evangelical Christian groups on a broader public relations campaign that could include television and radio ads.

The rest here.

According to this study,
http://publicreligion.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Millennials-Survey-Report
Obama may be better off getting milennials of all faiths and none to the polls than worrying about what Catholics- liberal or conservative– think about him per se.

Yes, that Bishop Jenky…

NCR reports:

Almost 50 University of Notre Dame faculty members have urged Bishop Daniel Jenky of Peoria, Ill., to “renounce loudly and publicly” his recent comparison of President Barack Obama with Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler.

If he does not do so, they said, Notre Dame should seek the bishop’s immediate resignation from the university’s Board of Fellows.

Snip

The Notre Dame professors said Jenky’s comparison of the HHS regulation to the attacks on the church by Bismarck, Clemenceau, Stalin and Hitler was “profoundly offensive.”

“Bishop Jenky’s comments demonstrate ignorance of history, insensitivity to victims of genocide, and absence of judgment,” they wrote in the letter. “We accept that Bishop Jenky’s comments are protected by the First Amendment, but we find it profoundly offensive that a member of our beloved university’s highest authority, the Board of Fellows, should compare the president’s actions with those whose genocidal policies murdered tens of millions of people, including the specific targeting of Catholics, Jews, and other minorities for their faith.”

The faculty members’ letter, addressed to Notre Dame’s president, Holy Cross Fr. John Jenkins and board president Richard Notebaert and released Friday, called for a university statement “that will definitively distance Notre Dame from Bishop Jenky’s incendiary statement.”

“Further, we feel that it would be in the best interest of Notre Dame if Bishop Jenky resigned from the University’s Board of Fellows if he is unwilling to renounce loudly and publicly this destructive analogy,” the letter states.

Read the letter here.

Terry Eagleton, whose evisceration of Richard Dawkins still resounds, has a review in the new TLS (subscription only) of Richard Sennett’s latest book, Together: The rituals, pleasures and politics of cooperation. The editors entitled the review, “On meaning well,” which already suggests that Eagleton, Marxist and Catholic, occasional contributor to Commonweal, and author of a widely noted book on evil, will be unenthusiastic. It begins:

There is something peculiarly unsatisfying about cases with which no decent-minded reader could disagree. Richard Sennett speaks up in this new study for trust, loyalty, teamwork, dialogue, pluralism, an acceptance of difference and a sensitivity to others. It is not the most world-shaking of moral standpoints. It is hard to see it competing with Machiavelli’s The Prince or Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals for sheer shock value. Not many works loudly proclaim the virtues of suspicion, disloyalty, uniformity and rampant egotism. One that did would at least have the value of contentiousness, which is more than can be said for this bien-pensant offering. Read the rest of this entry »

Politico reports that Health and Human Services has a new deputy assistant secretary for public affairs.  He is Tait Sye, media director for Planned Parenthood for the last four and a half years.  At HHS, according to Politico, he will handle communications for the public health portfolio–the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention–areas “where you can be pretty sure abortion and contraception issues will come up.”

Sister Mary Ann Walsh, head of media relations for the USCCB, was considered for the job but HHS decided that hiring a religious sister would violate the First Amendment and, besides, it might annoy the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.  No, I just made that last sentence up.

Anti-abortion groups are outraged by the new HHS hire, Politico reports.  If all this is true, I’m not exactly outraged myself, just fairly dismayed.

Here’s the Politico story:

“These are mature Christian women, and to be placed in a kind of pen as if they were schoolchildren is humiliating and inappropriate.”

“Why have they done this? I dont’ know.”

Watch here.

After much procrastination (heck, I could have done this a month ago here in CA,) I finally got the garden tilled today. There’s nothing like a freshly tilled plot–it’s all potential at the start, as the scholastics might say, devoid of weeds, with some new topsoil and fertilizer raked in. An unplanted garden is a place for (nearly) limitless veggie dreams. Two questions:

1. What are you planting this year? What do you hope for? I think, along with the usual tomatoes, zukes ‘n’ cukes, I’ll put in a row of sunflowers just because. In recent years I haven’t made good use of the corn I’ve grown, but you can’t go wrong with sunflowers, eh? They’re simple delight whether or not I ever do anything with the seeds.

2. What’s your gardening soundtrack? There’s the classic “Garden Song” that starts “inch by inch, row by row, gonna make this garden grow,” which is nice enough, though it has some puzzling lyrics. (“Pulling weeds, picking stones, we are made of dreams and bones. Need a place to call my own, ’cause the time is close at hand.” It’s a tad grim, as though the gardener expects to be, um, planted in his own plot. Or is it apocalyptic? Nah. Apocalyptic and gardening don’t mix…) As I struggled to get the tiller through the thick layer of grass and weeds, I hummed the Doors’ “Break on Through to the Other Side,” and ruminated that “The First Cut is the Deepest” definitely doesn’t apply to tilling. Got another good gardening/tilling/weeding song?

The New York Times reports today on its front page of a course offered at New York University by that venerable institution’s President, Dr. John Sexton. The course is entitled, “Baseball as a Road to God.”

Here is a profile of the professor-president:

As the president of N.Y.U., Dr. Sexton could certainly teach any course he wanted. And as the former dean of its law school and clerk to a chief justice of the United States, he might have been expected to hold forth on jurisprudence. However, as a child of Brooklyn, as a scholar whose academic robe bears the number 42 in homage to Jackie Robinson, and as a practicing Catholic with a doctoral degree in religion, Dr. Sexton has for more than a dozen years chosen baseball and God as his professorial focus.

And, as they say in the pastoral fields of academe, here are the course’s objectives and desired outcomes:

“The real idea of the course,” he put it in an interview, “is to develop heightened sensitivity and a noticing capacity. So baseball’s not ‘the’ road to God. For most of us, it isn’t ‘a’ road to God. But it’s a way to notice, to cause us to live more slowly and to watch more keenly and thereby to discover the specialness of our life and our being, and, for some of us, something more than our being.”

However, leave it to the Times to inject a discordant note into this otherwise bucolic baseball idyll:

Dr. Sexton’s own baseball career peaked as an all-star catcher in the B’nai B’rith Little League in the Rockaways — “Billy Ryan and I broke the religion line, we were the first two goyim” — and included being in a third-floor classroom in high school when a teenage Joe Torre broke the window with a home run from an adjacent ballfield. Over the passing decades, Dr. Sexton adapted to the Dodgers’ departure from Brooklyn by joining his son in rooting for the Yankees. Whether such a transfer of devotion constitutes heresy is a question, perhaps, for the magisterium.

A lot of people are talking about this obituary for Facts that appeared in the Chicago Tribune. Thought you might enjoy it. As Rex W. Huppke wrote:

To the shock of most sentient beings, Facts died Wednesday, April 18, after a long battle for relevancy with the 24-hour news cycle, blogs and the Internet. Though few expected Facts to pull out of its years-long downward spiral, the official cause of death was from injuries suffered last week when Florida Republican Rep. Allen West steadfastly declared that as many as 81 of his fellow members of the U.S. House of Representatives are communists.

Monsignor Charles Pope of the Archdiocese of Washington posts regularly. Recently he had some reflections on the importance of music that climaxed with a remarkable video.

Scripture says the Lord puts music in our hearts and that many, by it will be summoned to faith: The Lord set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand. He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God. Many will see and fear and put their trust in the LORD. (Psalm 40:3-4)

Yes, music can often reach where mere words cannot.

In this remarkable video, there is a older man, Henry,  who, likely due to seizures or other age-related factors, had largely turned inward. In fact his very posture illustrates well St. Augustine’s remarkable diagnosis of our problem: curvatus in se (turned in on himself).

Henry’s daughter remembers a lively vivacious man who quite literally danced through life a had such a joix de vivre. But in the last ten years he had shut down and turned in.

Then the miracle, a miracle in something ordinary, yet mystical: music. Wait till you see how it awakens Henry. Quite an astonishing difference. Yes, and suddenly there came the discovery for the staff of the nursing home, and Henry’s daughter, that there was someone “alive inside” Henry’s aging body. Alive indeed, the human soul still deeply touched by the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Henry says when he hears music, “I feel loved….the Lord came to me and made me a holy man…So he gave me these sounds.”

The whole post and the video to which he refers is here.

The CDF’s “Doctrinal Assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious” is, in my reading, rather short on evidence of the LCWR’s urgent need for reform. One of the few concrete examples given is a keynote address (pdf) delivered by Laurie Brink, OP, at the 2007 LCWR assembly:

The Cardinal [William Levada] offered as an example specific passages of Sr. Laurie Brink’s address about some Religious “moving beyond the Church” or even beyond Jesus. This is a challenge not only to core Catholic beliefs; such a rejection of faith is also a serious source of scandal and is incompatible with religious life. Such unacceptable positions routinely go unchallenged by the LCWR…

Was Sr. Brink rejecting core Catholic beliefs in her address? The Elizabeth Johnson affair has made me skeptical of such claims, so I decided I ought to read her talk for myself.

The subject of Sr. Brink’s address was the various ways congregations of women religious might confront their futures. After each section, there is an invitation for the sisters present to discuss the points raised among themselves, and I must say, reading it, I felt like I was eavesdropping. It wasn’t addressed to me, and their discussions should not be constrained by what outside observers might take out of context. But now that the CDF has made it a matter of general interest, I’m glad I read it. I found that the section referred to above was not at all what the CDF’s description led me to expect. I also found that the rest of the address was relevant to the CDF’s concerns in a number of suprising ways. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in February, I posted on the apparent demise of Brooklyn’s Nazareth Regional High School, my alma mater. The reasons for the board’s decision to close the Xaverian Brothers-sponsored school were depressingly familiar: declining enrollment and rising debt.

A few days later, I noted reports that the school was being flooded with offers of financial aid and asked: Is it possible?

The answer, as it turned out, was yes. The school  announced this week that it has succeeded in gaining both the enrollment and financing to remain open. It’s a remarkable story.

It seems to me that news of the school’s plan to close brought a flood of publicity about the school’s many virtues. The school, with an entirely minority student population, graduates just about all of its students and sends them to college. It has some very good programs in technology and preparation for careers in health. And it just has the buzz of a good Catholic school – friendly, respectful relations between teachers and students, good discipline and a religiously based sense of mission.

For a number of years, I served on the board (but not for the past few years, so I’m not privy to the current decision-making). I felt we were never able to get the word out about the school. There was little money available for advertising or public relations. When the word finally got out, it made a difference.

If there is a lesson for Catholic education in the Nazareth saga, I think it’s that the word needs to get out about what makes it special and why it’s worth saving.

William Deresiewicz on the tyranny of freedom:

The only thing we seem to believe in anymore is freedom. Freedom has become the be-all and the end-all of our political expectation, the full meaning of the American experiment.Justice is gone, and even more conspicuously banished is that term of terms for movements from abolitionism to feminism, for Lincoln and King: equality.

Eric Hobsbawm on Tony Judt:

Tony has been presented as another George Orwell. This is wrong, because while both were enormously gifted and profoundly polemical, they were very different. Tony lacked Orwell’s combination of prejudices, forward and backward-looking Old Testament prophecy and imaginative denunciation – he could never have written 1984or Animal Farm. And Orwell, the more powerful writer, had neither Tony’s remarkable range of knowledge, nor his wit, intellectual speed and manoeuvrability: there is no way he could have doubled as an academic.

Nicholas Lemann on the politics of inequality:

Even if you think that all a good society requires is—according to the debatable conservative mantra—equal opportunity for every citizen, you ought to be a little shaken right now. Opportunity is increasingly tied to education, and educational performance is tied to income and wealth. When it comes to social mobility between generations, the United States ranks near the bottom of developed nations.

And Timothy Noah on the same topic:

Academics have been studying income distribution for a century; the National Bureau of Economic Research was founded with the avowed purpose of producing objective, non-ideological research on this topic. America’s ruling class used to worry quite a lot about income inequality because it feared it might lead to the radical overthrow of the U.S. government. When it discovered, in recent decades, that all growing income inequality did was boost sales of crystal meth, increase out-of-wedlock pregnancies, and lead to a variety of other self-destructive behaviors on the part of an ever-more-despairing working class that no longer had much of a labor movement to defend its interests, the plutocrats lost interest in the subject.

1. After a long investigation, the Vatican has announced a major restructuring of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. (From the archives, our 2009 article by a nun responding to that investigation.)

2. Apparently Rome and the ultra-traditionalist Society of St. Pius the X (yes, those people) are close to healing the breach opened by SSPX when they started consecrating their own bishops. (Michael Sean Winters is pleased as punch.)

3. The bishops have delivered four letters to Congress explaining that — no matter how much he wishes — Paul Ryan’s budget does not quite rise to the level of authoritative Catholic teaching. (House Speaker John Boehner rebuffs them.)

At the end of March, HHS gave additional guidance on how the accommodation would operate. What do you think?  Note the tone: trying to balance  interests in a pluralistic society.

https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2012/03/21/2012-6689/certain-preventive-services-under-the-affordable-care-act#h-9

On April 14, Bishop Daniel Jenky, CSC, of Peoria, Illinois, delivered a homily to about five-hundred men on the theme of heroic Catholicism. After speaking quite movingly on the Resurrection, on evangelization in the face of impossible odds, persecution, Jenky pivoted to discuss contemporary challenges to Christian witness. Can you guess what those might be?

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